This was, by precise design, a dream come true. A six-year-old lad puts on his beloved team's kit, clutches the captain's hand and walks on to a Premiership pitch as the crowd roars its welcome. He's ball boy for the afternoon, famous for two minutes in a small, touching ritual you've seen a hundred times - the familiar moment when our greatest game seeks to show a soft heart.

And - oh yes! - it cost his dad £200 cash, up front. Doesn't the relentless, tatty avarice get you down?

We're repeatedly urged to get angry about sky-high City salaries: which I am, except that the only top earners I know are out of a job at the moment. We're told to punish the BBC for giving Jonathan Ross £6m a year. But look at Frank Lampard - taking a million or so more than that for every one of the next five years on a fixed, unsackable contract. Look at John Terry, leaving Wossie far behind. Look at Cristiano Ronaldo, openly hankering after Real Madrid's £180,000 a week (and limping by on a mere £119, 000 while he gets his foot fixed).

This is the worst recession since Alistair Darling began, our glum chancellor claimed over the weekend. The years of plenty and facile, unrealistic assumptions are over. The crunch has bitten Ally's legs. But why, pray - how, pray - in a nation supposedly on its knees, with repossessions soaring week by the week and political fortunes plummeting, could 34,000 turn out at Goodison this weekend, paying £30-plus a head, to see an enfeebled Everton walloped by Portsmouth? This is Merseyside, for heaven's sake, the brokest of the broke. But zip goes another million.

Of course, in theory, it can't go on. Harry Redknapp at Pompey says he's all spent out. The squabbling Americans who own Liverpool have put moving from Anfield on hold. Out of the Premier spotlight, the likes of Coventry and Luton scrabble for survival. And yet it does go on. Those Lampard and Terry salaries are new. And just sit down with your calculator at midnight tonight, counting as the transfer window snaps temporarily shut. Who can compete with Tottenham, more than £50m already spent? What am I finally bid for this brooding Berbatov or flamboyant Robinho? Anyone fancy Titian and Veronese to shore up their back four? Liverpool can't afford Stanley Park, but can somehow manage £12m for another Spanish import?

The great transfer game, in short, finds business much as usual - and played out on an ocean of debt. Chelsea had a net borrowing of £620m as they began last season (on Deloitte figures) and it took a personal loan of £90m from Roman Abramovich to keep them moving on. Liverpool found themselves £56m adrift on the loan front and need that bigger capacity ground to make any financial sense of the next five years. Wages alone at Villa, Everton and Wigan easily exceeded revenue. Manchester City, West Ham and Middlesborough owed £330m between them.

It's a story to make Northern Rock seem a bastion of prudence by comparison: total profligacy inviting certain retribution. But the whistle never blows. Sometimes - as this season - TV rights come to the temporary rescue. Sometimes, in happier years, a chummy bank manager will do. Often a saviour - Russian oligarchs, Icelandic entrepreneurs, ex-prime ministers of Thailand - will emerge when the going is roughest. The carousel of cash and heedlessness never stops.

Wage inflation may not be hitting the 20% level of years just gone by, but it can still make millionaires of pretty ordinary journeymen in the Coca-Cola Championship - and League Two (ie Third Division) cloggers take home twice as much as Gordon Brown. It's idiotic. It bears no relation to the bad times that wash around us. Crisis, what crisis? Go out and see whether £20m will buy a new striker. Football has become a parallel universe inhabited by excess, groin strains and continuing England international failure.

The whole creaking edifice needs a short, sharp shock to make Darling quail. Not Luton's or Bournemouth's tiddlers tottering near the brink, but an Enronic apocalypse, a giant bubble burst with a bang. Send Abramovich back to Siberia as Georgia tit for tat? Move Manchester City to south Bangkok? Close Liverpool until its owners get their act together? There has to be a moment when reality finally bites soccer's legs; when the cost of this three-ring circus bears some relationship to the price of bread. And who knows, we might even live to exalt it in a cruel world that has given us our ordinary heroes.